War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [381]
“Drop it, really! You’ll only bind yourself…”
“Go to hell,” said Anatole, and seizing himself by the hair, he went to the next room, came back at once, and sat with his legs tucked under in an armchair in front of Dolokhov. “Devil knows what it is! Eh? Feel how it’s pounding!” He took Dolokhov’s hand and put it to his heart. “Ah! quel pied, mon cher, quel regard! Une déesse!!*385 Eh?”
Dolokhov, with a cold smile and flashing his beautiful, insolent eyes, looked at him, clearly wanting to taunt him a little longer.
“Well, when the money’s gone, what then?”
“What then? Eh?” Anatole repeated, genuinely puzzled by the thought of the future. “What then? I don’t know what then…But why talk nonsense!” He looked at his watch. “It’s time!”
Anatole went to the back room.
“Well, will you make it soon? No dawdling here!” he shouted at the servants.
Dolokhov put the money away and, shouting for his man, so as to order food and drinks served before the road, went to the room where Makarin and Khvostikov were sitting.
Anatole lay on the sofa in the study, propped on his elbows, smiling pensively and whispering tenderly to himself.
“Go and eat something. Or drink!” Dolokhov called to him from the other room.
“I don’t want to!” Anatole replied, still smiling.
“Come, Balaga’s here.”
Anatole got up and went to the dining room. Balaga was a famous troika driver, who had known Dolokhov and Anatole for six years already and furnished them with his troikas. More than once, when Anatole’s regiment was stationed in Tver, he had taken him from Tver in the evening, brought him to Moscow by dawn, and taken him back the next night. More than once he had driven Dolokhov, when he had had to elude pursuit; more than once he had taken them for a ride around town with Gypsies and “damsels,” as Balaga called them. More than once, while in their employ, he had run down folk and cabbies in Moscow, and his “gentlemen,” as he called them, had always helped him out. More than one horse had been overdriven under them. More than once he had been beaten by them; more than once they had gotten him drunk on champagne and Madeira, which he liked, and he knew a thing or two about each of them which would have sent an ordinary man to Siberia long ago. They often invited Balaga to go carousing with them, made him drink and dance with the Gypsies, and more than one thousand of their roubles had gone through his hands. While in their service, he risked his life and his hide twenty times a year, and he had driven more horses to death than they had paid him roubles. But he liked them, liked their mad rides at twelve miles an hour, liked overturning other cabbies, and running down Moscow pedestrians, and going at full gallop down the Moscow streets. He liked hearing the wild shouts of drunken voices behind him: “Faster! Faster!” when it was impossible to go any faster. He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to a peasant, who even without that was trying, more dead than alive, to get out of his way. “Real gentlemen!” he thought.
Anatole and Dolokhov also liked Balaga for his masterful driving, and for liking the same things they did. With others Balaga haggled, charged twenty-five roubles for a two-hour ride, and very rarely went himself, but sent the boys who worked for him. But with his gentlemen, as he called them, he always went himself and never asked anything for his work. Only when he learned through valets that there was money there would he come, once every few months, in the morning, sober, and with low bows ask them to help him out. The gentlemen always invited him to sit down.
“Do help me out, dear Fyodor Ivanych, or you, Your Excellency,” he would say. “I’ve got no horses left, and it’s time to go to the fair. Advance me what you can.”
And Anatole and Dolokhov, if they had money, would give him a thousand roubles or two.
Balaga was a blond, squat, snub-nosed man, with a red face and an especially red, thick neck, about twenty-seven years old, with small, glittering eyes and a little